Belgium’s Library de Kimpel is the latest library featured at arch daily. Designed by Adem Architecten the new library was part of a master plan that included turning the existing library into offices and an exhibition center and the construction of a new youth center. The project was completed in 2015.

The interior of the library is designed and organized around 5 subject areas: Music, Literature and Poetry, Lifestyle and Sport, Art and Architecture and Travel.

When the students of Mundelein High School in Mundelein, Illinois returned to school from winter break there was something different about the hallways of the English department.

Six floor-to-ceiling vinyl prints of book covers had been installed while they were away in the hopes that it would encourage students to talk more about their reading life.

School spokesman Ron Girard says that the project was intended to “get students talking about the reading that they do” and has succeeded in that in addition to talking books in class “now the chatter among students even takes place in the hallways when they see images of books they have read.”

The six books chosen where Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; Beartown by Fredrik Backman; Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro; October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard by Leslea Newman; Born to Run by Christopher McDougall; and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Kiely Brendan.

]]>http://bookpatrol.net/a-high-school-english-department-goes-big-to-encourage-reading/In the Stacks: Medicine and Madison Avenuehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BookPatrol/~3/s4rEZaXlNlU/
Wed, 09 Jan 2019 19:30:46 +0000http://bookpatrol.net/?p=10967The Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University holds an extensive collection of more than 3 million items that document the history of sales, advertising and marketing throughout the past two centuries.

From that massive archive comes the digital collection Medicine and Madison Avenue. A gathering of close to 600 advertising items and publications illustrating the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States. Enjoy this sampling of familiar products, and who knew one could “Minimize the After-Effects of Tobacco” with Phillips Milk of Magnesia.

Bob Dylan is the subject of a new anthology of poems edited by two retired professors from his home state of Minnesota.

Whittled down to 100 poems from a pool of 500 Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan is a collection honoring Dylan by poets in various stages of their careers. Contributors include Robert Bly; Charles Bukowski; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Patti Smith and Anne Waldman as well as this lost musing from Johnny Cash that appeared in the liner notes for Dylan’s 1969 album “Nashville Skyline,” and won a Best Album Notes Grammy:

Complete unto itself, full,

flowing.

So are some souls like stars

And their words, works and songs

Like strong, quick flashes of

light …

There is no end to the cultural influences of this master lyricist and musician.

Speaking of poets and Bob Dylan, in case you haven’t seen this in a while here is the music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” featuring Allen Ginsberg. As the Independent pointed out after he won the Nobel Prize in 2016 Dylan has leaned on poetry more than any other musician.

Banned Booksellers Week has begun with a bang. David Streitfeld’s piece in the New York Times has kicked off what some hope will be a defining moment in the history of online bookselling.

For the week of November 5 to 11, 2018, booksellers around the world will remove their inventory from Abebooks, an Amazon company, in a show of support for their brethren in South Korea, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Russia who were told they can no longer sell on their platform.

Many were angered at the flippant response provided by Abebooks as to why the booksellers were removed claiming that “it is no longer viable for us to operate in these countries due to increasing costs and complexities”. An apparent issue with a payment processing company has forced them to cease operations in these select countries essentially eliminating the critical online revenue streams for many of these booksellers. Knowing the reach and power of their parent company this seems like a surmountable issue.

Founded in 1995 Abebooks was one of the early players in the online bookselling field, quickly becoming the dominant force in the used and collectible space and offering hope to many of the independent booksellers of the day who where trying to make their way in the online world. Abebooks was acquired by Amazon in 2008 ending that hope and any chance of keeping one’s independence.

Bookseller admin screen denoting that books have been placed on vacation, removing them from circulation via

This is the latest in a string of brazen actions that have already altered the trade beyond anything recognizable to past generations of booksellers.

Remember the arrival of the penny-sellers? A breed of bookseller spawned by technology that infiltrated the online marketplace and devised a pricing technology to ensure that their copy would be the cheapest one available online even if it went down to a penny! In a 2007 post I noted there where 300,000 books listed on Amazon for a penny.

This piece of software essentially devastated huge swaths of the used book market. The race to the bottom had begun.

Then in late 2014 another new breed of bookseller emerged, the Bookjacker! Technology now made it possible for these “booksellers” to flag books that are uploaded and only appear on one marketplace and then re-upload them to additional marketplaces under their moniker and at an inflated price! So now we have a class of fourth-party sellers who don’t own any books, raid the inventory of third-party sellers and whose only affinity to books is a monetary one. Remember Amazon gets paid twice, once when the deceived customer buys the book and once when one of those outfits buys the tangible copy from an independent bookseller. It also harkens back to Amazon’s earliest days as a drop-shipper. Commodities not vessels became the mantra.

If there was a hint of respect left for their community of independent booksellers and the inventory they procure and make available to the world there would never be room for bookjackers in the marketplace and they would never eliminate entire countries of booksellers.

Banned Booksellers week is a great start and fingers are crossed that booksellers will continue to take aggressive action against the companies who no longer have their basic interests in mind.

As of this writing 536 booksellers from 26 countries have placed 3.3 million books, who one veteran bookseller has estimated to be worth over $1 billion, on vacation from Abebooks.

]]>http://bookpatrol.net/bookseller-revolt-independents-vacate-abebooks-in-solidarity/Time to Pick the Oddest Book Title of the Yearhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BookPatrol/~3/M6Mto58ZqIo/
Tue, 30 Oct 2018 18:29:23 +0000http://bookpatrol.net/?p=10788

It’s time for the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. First conceived at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978 in order to “stave off boredom”. The inaugural prize was awarded to Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (University of Tokyo Press). Other notable winners include: How to Avoid Huge Ships (1992), Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (1996), Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way (2010) and Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop (2012). Last year’s winner was The Commuter Pig Keeper.

The American Library Association has released it latest Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for its ilovelibraries initiative. The new READ® poster and video features Zoë Kravitz and combines Kravitz’s library love with the upcoming film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in which she stars.

The poster features Kravitz in her character Leta Lestrange and the video is part film trailer and part Kravitz sharing her thoughts on the magic of books.

The poem above was written by a robot. The kicker is not that a robot created the poem but that it was constructed based on the image!

That’s right. Auto-generated poetry based on an image.

It’s one of the latest discoveries to come out of Microsoft Research Asia where a pair of Microsoft researches teamed up with a pair of professors at Kyoto University to discover the ‘poet in the machine’

The team:

took an imaginative approach to the quest of generating poetic language in response to images for automatic poetry creation, opening new possibilities for augmenting human endeavor. The project involved multiple challenges, including discovering poetic clues from images, as well as generating poems that would satisfy both relevance to an image and — something difficult to define but not disputed to exist — poeticness, to use the term coined by the researchers.

Their goal isn’t to replace poets, it’s about the myriad applications that can augment creative activity and achievement that the existence of even mildly creative AI could represent.”

The team will be sharing it’s findings at an upcoming multimedia conference in Seoul.

What are they working on next? Storytelling, where the machine generates a story from multiple images — they call it visual storytelling.

A beautifully produced survey exploring the relationship between the visual and literary arts over the last five centuries. Featuring over 150 paintings that include books as part of their subject matter.